Meet the Original Disneylanders

ANAHEIM, Calif. - Sept. 23, 2019 - PRLog -- Walking through Disneyland, you'll spot cast members dressed up as cowboys in Frontierland, jungle explorers in Adventureland, and small-town shopkeepers on Main Street. But, back when the park first opened in 1955, the employees weren't pretending. They were true-to-life characters, hand-picked for their amazing backgrounds.
 Now for the first time you can get to know these fascinating personalities in The 55ers: The Pioneers Who Settled Disneyland by David Koenig. Available October 1, the beautiful oversized hardcover volume will introduce you to more than 700 Year-One cast members from every department in the park, including:
• Disneyland's notorious first general manager, C.V. Wood, and his "Texas mafia,"
• Vesey Walker, the bristly conductor of the Disneyland Band, and the 16 often-crazy musicians who followed him,
• The overly serious Marshal Lucky and his never-serious-enough nemesis, the villainous Black Bart,
• K7 the Kaiser Aluminum Spaceman,
• Merlin's Magic Shop magicians,
• Upjohn pharmacists,
• Hobbyland model airplane flyers,
• Golden Horseshoe can-can dancers,
• Plus the very first nurses, security officers, firemen, mule wranglers, ticket sellers, newsboys, switchboard operators, TWA Rocket to the Moon hostesses, and many, many more.
The 55ers features more than 300 never-before-published images, most of them provided by the original Disneylanders themselves. The candid photos provide peeks inside a number of long-vanished areas of the park, including the Sunny-View Jams & Jellies shop, the Plantation House chicken restaurant, and the Adventureland Bazaar.
Author David Koenig is best-known for his best-selling Mouse Tales: A Behind-the-Ears Look at Disneyland. Cover designer and artist Mike Peraza is a longtime animator and art director on The Little Mermaid.
The 55ers: The Pioneers Who Settled Disneyland will be released October 1, 2019, at retailers nationwide (Bonaventure Press, ISBN 978-1-937878-10-8, $55.00, Hardcover).